Going to the Birds

While Audubon’s National CBC effort began Christmas Day 1900, the first known Minnesota CBCs were conducted on Christmas Day 1905 in Minneapolis, and Red Wing. Since then, thousands of participants have logged well over 80,000 total hours, traveling nearly 500,000 miles by car, foot, ski, bike, horse, snowmobile, or other method to count birds on one of the reported

1,959 individual CBC areas. As the Minnesota CBC effort enters its 102nd year, the state list of Christmas Bird Census species currently stands at 201, with a total census at well over 8,540,992 birds. Today, over 55,000 volunteers from all 50 states, every Canadian province, parts of Central and South America, Bermuda, the West Indies, and Pacific islands count and record every individual bird and bird species seen in a specified area. Each count group completes a census of the birds found during one 24-hour period between December 14 and January 5 in a designated circle 15 miles in diameter-about 177 square miles.